What is a Bothie Phone?

29 Aug 2017 by Jon Mundy

You’ve heard of the selfie, but some smartphone manufacturers and app developers have been trying to make the ‘bothie’ a thing. So what exactly is a bothie, does it have a future, and how can you go about experiencing one?

What is a bothie?

As we alluded to in the intro, the bothie is related to the selfie - that is, the practice of taking a picture of yourself, usually with your smartphone’s front-facing camera.

In the case of the bothie, you take a picture of both yourself (with the front camera) and the scene or subject in front of you (with the rear camera), then have your phone combine the two into a single image.

What’s the point of that?

Shooting a bothie in this way gives you the best of both worlds. You get an unobstructed view of the scene you want to capture through the rear camera, and also a snap of your face as you take it all in.

There are similar advantages with video content captured in this way. It means you can record both sides of a conversation simultaneously, for example, or record an event taking place while commenting on it live through the front camera.

What are the down sides?

Of course, the bothie concept is a lot more convoluted than the selfie. You’re essentially looking at two distinct pictures rather than a single all-encompassing image.

It’s also worth pointing out that while both snaps occur within the same environment, the two portions won’t necessarily feel of a piece. The reverse view from a landmark like the Tower of London isn’t guaranteed to be quite so picturesque.

Is it just a gimmick then?

It’s way too early to tell. For an awful long time, many critics turned their noses up at the idea of the selfie, and called that a gimmick. Now it’s a deeply engrained part of popular culture, and for many people the front-facing camera on their phone is more important than the rear.

We don’t know if the bothie will truly take hold of the public imagination in the same way. But it’s a brave (or foolish) person that discounts the possibility out of hand.

How do you take a bothie?

The most high profile and recent example of the bothie phone can be found in the Nokia 8, which launches this September. This device marks the Finnish brand’s long-awaited return to the flagship smartphone market, and its headline feature is its bothie prowess.

Nokia calls this ‘Dual-Sight’ mode (while also invoking the ‘bothie’ term). Interestingly, it includes the ability to live broadcast dual videos to Facebook or Youtube.

While Nokia is the one smartphone maker that’s going big with the bothie in 2017, however, it isn’t an entirely new concept. Most notably Samsung and LG have both enabled you to slip a selfie into the frame of a normal picture in previous phones, though they haven’t been pushing the concept of late.

Elsewhere, third party apps like Frontback have long enabled you to achieve a similar effect with any iPhone or Android device. Technically, then, any phone can be a ‘bothie phone’.